Historians of asylums in India, South Africa and Australasia have stressed the importance of 'colonialism' as an analytic tool in the assessment of the activities of asylum officials and doctors. This book explores local medical, lay and legal negotiations with the asylum system in nineteenth-century Ireland. It deepens people's understanding of attitudes towards the mentally ill and institutional provision for the care and containment of people diagnosed as insane. The book expands the analytical focus beyond asylums incorporating the impact that the Irish poor law, petty session courts and medical dispensaries had on the provision of services. It builds on 'Mark Finnane's study of the origins and subsequent development of the asylum system. The national context to the introduction of asylum legislation is presented and the Carlow asylum district within the topography of institutional provision is situated. The focus is also on local actors in civil society - patients, families, poor law guardians, magistrates, police and doctors - and their interactions with asylums and with each other in responding to and managing the insane and insanity. Asylums and certification procedures and the lunacy inspectors' drive to publicly and practically place medical certification, and establish medical rather than legal actors as asylum gatekeepers is discussed. Irish families invoked certification to impose normative roles and to resolve conflict. The book emphasises the degree to which the asylum 'was a contested site, subject to continual negotiation amongst different parties'.

allowed into the
Georgetown Citizens’ Association in 1945 after the group lifted a ban on
female membership earlier that year. 41 She stayed deeply connected
to the neighborhood until her death, when she owned two houses in the
area.
Her knowledge of historic homes and familiarity with the
suffrage movement undoubtedly made her a logical choice to chair the House
Committee of the National Woman’s Party by Florence Bayard Hilles. Hilles
was an old friend and came from the Bayard family of Delaware, who had close

concludes that
it is important to care about carers, but doing so must be in a manner which
continues to respect the distinct individual rights of each of the parties to the
caring relationship.
The situated subject, relational autonomy and rights
There are theoretical, legal and practical reasons why it makes sense to acknowledge within the legal framework that individuals exist in relationships with
others. Arguably the strongest reason to do this is because it is in fact the reality
of the situation. Feminist theorists and others arguing from a critical perspective

Gladys Carter (mentioned at the beginning of
the chapter) accused voluntary hospitals of being dominated ‘by the
customs and architecture of 1860’.51 Pearce and Carter represented
a new current of opinion in nursing which attacked the matron-­
dominated College of Nursing Council on the grounds that it was
out of touch with reality and did not speak for the new generation of
nurses.52
137
Who cared for the carers?
The Working Party on Nurse Recruitment and Training 1946
The establishment of the NHS and the anticipated expansion in facilities and increase in demand

England owing to overwhelming weakness … because so long as I am here in
the country, if I have the name of being ill they can claim aright to come and
distinguish themselves by a rare sort of kindness towards the sick patients …2
Between 1912 and 1914 Anastasia O’D., a patient in Wexford District
Lunatic Asylum (Enniscorthy asylum), penned several letters to John
Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and a local Waterford
MP. In her correspondence, Anastasia provided her own narrative of her
behaviour, of the events that contributed to her ‘state of health

Xichun’s summary of the state of the two medical professions was probably still fairly accurate. According to official statistics, the
western medicine profession had grown more than fourfold to 38,000 doctors,
although only 20,000 may have been graduates of medical school programs.35
Similar statistics are not available for Chinese medicine physicians at this time,
but internal Communist Party documents from 1954 estimate that there were
about 500,000 doctors, a figure that can probably be used as a rough guide to
the number of doctors in the Republican era as well.36

).
Given the contrast between professional and government political projects, this chapter explores how management of professional labour became government policy during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite disparities in aims, specialists and elite professional bodies found common ground with government and state agencies over the production of guidelines and audit structures. All parties saw benefits in co-operation and actively sought collaboration. Reliant upon medical professionals to construct new tools, government often acted through financial support for local programmes

of Roman Catholic nuns would prove extremely recalcitrant.
Nightingale did not accomplish all of her enormous improvements in the Eastern hospitals with her original team of thirty-eight nurses as many people thought at the time and many still think today. In fact, she had to deal with more than a hundred women. Beginning in December 1855, the government sent eight more parties of nurses to twelve base hospitals. 1 The precise number of government nurses varies because sometimes the ladies in London who sent the nurses did not count the

: that limitations ‘should be established such as to ensure safety’.
28
There was no specific guidance relating to maximum working hours and, given the long hours worked by the crews of the York in 1953 and the Constellation aircraft in 1954, the Ministry of Aviation felt it was important that the current system be re-examined. The Working Party on Operating Crew Fatigue and Flight Time Limitations (hereafter referred to as the Bowhill Working Party) was established to this end. Sir Frederick Bowhill (1880–1960), a well

Turkey with forty-seven women, fifteen of whom were Roman Catholic nuns, on 17 December 1854. Nightingale had no positions for them in the two Scutari hospitals and sent the whole group to Therapia until she could make other arrangements. Although Herbert would affirm that the Stanley party, and Bridgeman’s group in particular, were under the same rules as the first team of nurses who went out in October, Stanley insisted that he had told her to report to Dr Cumming. 14 Stanley’s mother stated quite the contrary. She said that when Herbert had addressed the nuns